Integrating APIs into your eCommerce business can highly be beneficial for fulfilling the needs of customer satisfaction, achieving market goals, dealing with payment gateways and finances, incorporating product catalogs at different channels, and much more.
You can boost eCommerce growth in a planned manner if you utilize APIs for eCommerce in the correct and best way.
Most of the eCommerce business owners fail to realize the need for API for eCommerce. In fact, most don’t even know what the concept is despite blindly using it in their day-to-day activities.
Hence, before I take you through the advantages of using API for eCommerce, let me explain the basics.
What is an API in eCommerce?
An API, an abbreviation of Application Programming Interface is a method of communicating information using apps. Different applications quickly and seamlessly share data among them.
Most eCommerce business owners hire professional API developers to make their company’s app connect with other systems easily.
The best example for API is the way uber works. It takes the customer data into its app and sends it to the server where Google Maps is integrated with the passenger’s location and the nearest Uber is assigned.
Another great example is your food delivery services that take your order, find your location, and send your order details to the main kitchen preparing food.
Leveraging such API in the eCommerce business can highly help you grow as you sell products online and connect channels seamlessly.
What benefits can you get by using API in eCommerce? Let’s find out.
Benefits of API in eCommerce
Using API in eCommerce can scale up your business performance, not in one, but multiple ways, such as:
Improved customer experience
Integrating API in eCommerce automatically improves the customer experience. There are different kinds of API that directly and indirectly affect how your customer interacts with your eCommerce website.
In a study, it was found that 80% of the consumers stop doing business with brands if they experience a bad customer experience.
Search API
As eCommerce websites have thousands of products available in each category, scrolling through the clutter to find what your customer is looking for could be very difficult.
By implementing site search API in eCommerce enables your customers to easily find the exact products he or she’s looking for.
Integrating User-generated content
Social proof is the best strategy to market your products. Now, what could be better than letting your customers know what your other customers are saying about you and your products?
You can integrate an API in eCommerce that can directly fetch your social media feeds to your website and the product pages respectively.
Personalization
More than 74% of the shoppers will get frustrated and most will leave if the content is not personalized.
The best thing about personalization eCommerce API is that it can effectively address the needs of your customers.
Such API in eCommerce enables you to categorize the website content as per the different visitors and potential customers. It uses complex algorithms that help in rearranging your website content.
Thus, you get to present exact search results as to what the customers had been searching on social platforms and diverse search engines.
Easy and quick logins
Have you ever visited any app that allows you to signup using your Google or Facebook account without having to put any extra details?
Well, that’s the magic of API in eCommerce. If you integrate this API on your website, it can highly ease the process of signing up easier for your customers.
Spread product information
By utilizing Api in eCommerce, you can seamlessly sync your webpages for the product catalog directly with a huge, global database.
Such eCommerce APIs are excellent for displaying brand photos, detailed product descriptions, specifications, and complete product titles fetched from this global database having the entire product data.
Automate marketing operations
API in eCommerce makes performing marketing operations a breeze. This algorithm helps businesses to sell products online quickly, which in turn, reduces costs and time to market the products.
The use of marketing automation service reduces the hassle involved in writing heavy codes to execute such eCommerce APIs.
Using automation tools like MailChimp for email marketing automation helps your business to stay organized and run timely operations.
Security API
The highest vulnerable industry when it comes to security threats is eCommerce with 32.4% of the total share in the statistics.
The online world is an extremely dangerous place that has no security. You ought to be very careful while putting any of your personal details online. There are hackers and people with spoiled intentions who can get their hands on your valuable data.
Though this has been controlled as the websites have now started using SSL certificates mandatorily. The users are aware enough to access any website with care if there’s no SSL certificate available on it.
No one now puts their card details or banking information on any open sources or unprotected websites.
Thus, having this API in eCommerce as well as on other websites can help you avoid such discrepancies. For example, API OAuth2.0 is a great example of security APIs in eCommerce that protects user data and makes sure that it doesn’t reach any third-party.
Enables price comparability
If you are to sell products online successfully, you must set competitive prices for your items. At this point, having knowledge about your competitors’ pricing can be highly beneficial for you.
The price comparison APIs for eCommerce get pricing information from many different sites. You can link your catalog of products with a price comparison API for extracting automatic reports.
With this, you can know how your products are performing in the market in the context of pricing, enabling you to adjust your prices to stay competitive and reasonable.
Shipping made easy
Shipping API in eCommerce is best for online store owners who deal with drop shipments.
Along with shipping the actual physical product to your customer, there are more things that happen before, between, and after it.
As your customer places an order, automatic calculation of rates, creation of the label, and generation of tracking numbers so that the customer can stay updated throughout are all a must.
Dropshippers can easily automate their processes beginning from the sale of the product to the time it gets delivered.
Furthermore, Shipping API in eCommerce offers a tracking feature that both the seller and the customer can use to make sure that the delivery is made hassle-free.
Create references and recommendations
Recommendation Engine API is an excellent resource to attach trending as well as popular products to a specific page on your eCommerce website.
This way, if a new customer comes in, they can explore what’s trending that they might like too along with simply searching for what they’ve already decided.
How does this work? Basically, when you integrate personalization or recommendation engine API in eCommerce, the tools analyze the visitors’ browsing patterns and behavior and then recommend relevant products to other visitors.
This makes finding products a breeze and seamless while giving the customers a chance to explore new products.
Easy affiliation
If you’re involved in online selling, then you must be familiar with affiliation, especially Amazon affiliation.
If your eCommerce website already has widgets that are associated with products on Amazon, then I believe that you’re already making use of Amazon affiliate API.
Though if not, then having affiliate API in eCommerce is one of the easiest ways to associate it with your online store.
All you are required to do is signup for the affiliation program, copy the codes provided by the organization, and paste them on your website.
For example, you can get the affiliate links provided by Shopify.
Payment
If you sell products online, it’s highly important that you are providing valid online payment methods for easy payment fulfillment.
Thus, while dealing with electronic payments, missing a payment API feature is just not possible. This API in eCommerce makes sure that your site has a well-functioning payment procedure.
API for anti-fraud
An anti-fraud API ensures that you’re safe from any malicious activity or orders that might be just a fraud.
Such API in eCommerce enables you to detect frauds before they do any financial destruction to your online store.
It monitors different aspects like a proxy, credit card, etc, and flags the orders that might be potential fraud.
Conclusion
Improving and enhancing the functionality of your eCommerce business is now quicker and easier to establish. How APIs in eCommerce boosts eCommerce growth is pretty fascinating.
There are a lot of different aspects that eCommerce API can work with to strengthen those elements and make your eCommerce business a lot more intuitive, advanced, and safer both for you and your customers.
Author Bio–
Twitter: @chetanmenaria3
Instagram – @pixelphant
Bio: Chetan Menaria is Partnership & Collaboration Manager at PixelPhant an eCommerce & clipping path service provider. PixelPhant edit product images to make them look professional & eCommerce ready. Loves to learn new things every day, read something all the time, never miss the sunset & do Product Designing & Create content.